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Does Fireworks control your color palettes or do you?

As I sit here at the local laundry mat watching my clothes spin endlessly in the void of suds and dirt, I was thinking to myself "How many people really export their color palettes for later use in Fireworks"?

Do you export your color palettes? Why?

Do you save a copy for every client project you do in FW? Have a palette for every mood your in when you design mocks? Collect various palettes for various projects?

One of the main reasons I keep custom color palettes handy is so I can access any color from the popup color wells in the toolbox or property inspector. You’ll understand more once you try out the steps below:

You dont have any custom colors? (Skip this part if you do) Here’s a quick trick to gather color cubes from an image.

Steps to extract color information from an image:

Import any image you want to extract the color information out of

Open the Optimize panel (Window > Optimize)

Select GIF, Colors: 256

Click the "Rebuild" button (Snags the most popular colors from the image)

Open the Swatches panel. (Window > Swatches)

Select "Clear Swatches".

Click the icon in the top-right corner of the panel and select "Current Export Palette".

Now you should have some custom colors in the Swatches panel.

Save the palette somewhere useful. We’ll use it for the following steps.

Customizing the color palettes:

Open the Swatches panel

Click the icon in the top-right corner of the panel and select "Add Swatches", find the .act file we created earlier and select it.

You’ll notice by default, the custom colors were dumped right into the Swatches panel (Color Cubes), now open up the color well on the PI or toolbox and you’ll notice the custom colors are added there as well.

There’s a couple ways to do this technique, but experiment and see which works best for you.